The Bishops Avenue: is there anyone at home?

The builders are in and the Saudi royal family is off - are fortunes flagging
for Billionaires’ Row?

This strange road, which has been nicknamed “Millionaires’ Row” since the 1930s - when a million meant something. Now, it is called “Billionaires’ Row”. It was designed, from its earliest days, to be home to the very wealthy. Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley

You can tell when a property is out of your price bracket if the estate agent’s particulars come not on a sheet of A4 but are presented in a 50-page hardback coffee-table book, with a separate section for the staff quarters.

Other giveaway signs, in case you were in any doubt, are the fact the lift is leather-lined, there are 62 internal CCTV cameras, a private cinema, an indoor swimming pool, sauna, steam room, and a series of dressing rooms - “for both summer and winter”, the estate agent informs me - which are larger than many central London flats.

But then any property on The Bishops Avenue in north London is out of most people’s price bracket - such as number 62, otherwise known as Jersey House, which is on the market for £38 million. I am being shown around by Grant Alexson, from Knight Frank estate agents, both of us in our socks to ensure that we do not grubby the miles of carpets or marble floors in the bathrooms (all of which have televisions set into the walls).

Grant Alexson of estate agents Knight Frank at a luxury mansion on The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead .

My hopes of picking up a knock-down bargain had been raised after the news this week that one property on The Bishops Avenue, Dryades, had been repossessed. The owners, the family of the former Pakistan privatisation minister Waqar Ahmed Khan, were unable to settle a row with their lender, Deutsche Bank.

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It is not the only property in the hands of the receivers on this mile-long stretch. One was tied up in a Lehman Brothers property portfolio and remains boarded up. Meanwhile, the Saudi royal family, which bought 10 properties during the First Gulf War as boltholes in case Saddam Hussein invaded, has offloaded the entire package for a reported £80 million in recent weeks. And the most expensive property on the market, Heath Hall, had £35 million knocked off the asking price (taking it down to a mere £65 million).

This has all thrown the spotlight once again on this strange road, which has been nicknamed “Millionaires’ Row” since the 1930s - when a million meant something. Now, it is called “Billionaires’ Row”. It was designed, from its earliest days, to be home to the very wealthy. One of the first inhabitants was George Sainsbury, son of the supermarket founder; another was William Lyle, who used his sugar fortune to build a vast mansion in the Arts and Crafts style. Stars such as Gracie Fields also lived here.

But between the wars, the road became the butt of Music Hall comedians who joked about it being full of “des-reses” for the nouveaux riches such as Billy Butlin. Evelyn Waugh, the master of social nuance, made sure his swaggering newspaper baron Lord Copper of Scoop resided here. It was the 1970s, however, that saw the road vault from being home to millionaires to a pleasure ground for international plutocrats, who used their shipping or oil wealth to snap up properties, knock them down and build monstrous mansions in “Hollywood Tudor” style. Worse were the pastiches of Classical temples, the most notorious of which was built by the Turkish industrialist Halis Toprak, who decided the bath big enough to fit 20 people was not enough of a statement. So he slapped “Toprak Mansion” on the portico (causing locals to dub it “Top Whack Mansion”). It was sold a couple of years ago to the Kazakhstani billionairess Horelma Peramam, who renamed it Royal Mansion.

Perhaps the most famous of recent inhabitants was Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate, and for a long time Britain’s richest man. But he sold Summer Palace, for £38 million in 2011 to move to the much grander Kensington Palace Gardens, in the heart of London. The cast list became even more varied with the arrival of Salman Rushdie who hid behind bullet-proof glass and tycoon Asil Nadir, whose address is now HM Belmarsh Prison.

Of course, you can be hard-pressed to discover who owns these properties or how much anyone paid. These are not run-of-the-mill transactions between families moving home. Official Land Registry records reveal a complex web of deals between offshore companies. Miss Peramam holds Royal Mansion in the name of Hartwood Resources Company, registered in the British Virgin Islands, and the records suggest she paid closer to £40 million than the £50 million reported.

Alexson says the complexity of the deals are not just about avoiding stamp duty (which is now at 7 per cent for properties over £2 million). “Discretion first, tax second,” he argues. “Look, some of the Middle Eastern families own £500 billion. Stamp duty is not an issue for them.” Still, new tax rules this year, which increase stamp duty to 15 per cent if the property is bought through an offshore vehicle, have had an effect, according to Alexson, who says that the last five houses he sold have been bought by an individual, not a company.

But there is little sign of these individuals on the road itself. Walking down the main stretch of the Avenue from the beautiful Hampstead Heath to the booming A1, which bisects the road, more than 10 of these 39 houses are either boarded up or in a state of severe disrepair. Behind the high gates and walls, moss and weeds climb over the balustrades. Many others are clearly uninhabited, except for a crew of builders and a security guard. (Barnet council defends all the building work it has sanctioned, with Alexson pointing out that the new developments are invariably rectifying the worst atrocities of the 1980s.)

I ask Trevor Abrahmsohn, who runs Glentree Estates and has been selling houses here since the 1970s, how many people actually live on the road. He can’t tell me but insists “normal families” make up a large chunk of the neighbourhood and that there is “real community spirit”, adding rather unconvincingly that the wives get together when their husbands travel.

He blames the empty properties on the Saudi royal family, who never moved into the collection they bought in the 1990s. With those now sold to a developer, there is a chance the street will see an influx of new owners. But it seems unlikely. Because alongside the houses that are empty, and those being knocked down, there are a large number that are “turn-key ready” – fully furnished and ready for any buyer to move in or, perhaps, simply add the property to their investment portfolio. It is probable that no more than a third are lived in permanently.

Abrahmsohn, a former dentist who describes himself as a “paragon of Thatcherite enterprise”, shows me around Stratheden, a spectacular house built in the Dutch Cape style in 1927, with green, glazed roof tiles. Next to the pool there is a champagne bar stocked with 480 bottles of sparkling water (so as not to upset any Muslim buyer). “It’s meant to stimulate the juices, make you salivate, make you think you can live the dream.” The only person who lives there is Maria, the housekeeper; Abrahmsohn is hazy as to the last time anyone slept in the master bedroom suite. Land Registry records suggest Stratheden has done nothing but be redeveloped and sold on for the last 11 years, with the value climbing from £3.2 million in 2002, to £8.6 million in 2005, to £9.25 million in 2007. It is now on the market for £34 million.

Stratheden house

Abrahmsohn insists that The Bishops still retains its cachet. “This is effectively a cross between a dacha and a town house,” he says, gesturing to the beautiful garden, seen through the windows of the gold-walled ballroom. You get a country-sized property just a 15-minute drive from the West End, he explains. That is an optimistic estimate of traffic, but he is right that on a per-square foot basis this is a quarter of the price of Mayfair or Chelsea.

But the houses, despite their vastness and opulence, don’t quite live up to their billing. I knock on a large bronze statue and find it is resin replica; the gold napkin rings in the dining room are plastic and the sketches on the sitting room walls are soft porn by Gordon King, which can be picked up on eBay for £200. “Bishops Avenue is one of the best-known roads in the world and ranks alongside Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, Wall Street. If it didn’t exist, you’d have to invent it,” insists Abrahmsohn.

Stratheden house

That may be so. Still, to echo Laura Baker, a Hampstead resident I meet at the top of the street: “If I had all the money in the world, I wouldn’t live here.”